This Hallowed Ground

by Bruce Catton

  Fog of war lay on the land, and men had to make the best decisions they could by the murky light that was available. The men in Richmond determined that the Army of Northern Virginia must march to Pennsylvania, and there it did march, pulling the Army of the Potomac after it — a fated, tragic march that led to the nation’s most unforgettable single moment of tragic drama, but that led away from the main current of the war itself. Between them, the two armies that had to make this march would pay fifty thousand casualties for it.

  2. Moment of Truth

  Most of the men in the Army of the Potomac had been soldiers for very nearly two years. In those years a man who had been in all of the army’s battles — and very few had been in all of them — might have known as many as twenty days of actual combat. All the rest was monotony; endless days in camps, hour upon hour of work on the drill field, long marches on bad roads with hot sun and dust or cold rain and mud for accompaniment. The soldier’s greatest enemy always was simple boredom. The high adventure of army life came down at last to the eternal performance of dull tasks and to an unbroken routine of physical discomfort.

  Life after Chancellorsville went on much as it had always gone. The troops were sullen and perplexed, yet there was no great drop in morale as there had been after Fredericksburg. The memory of the terrible battle in the blazing thickets seemed to be dulled very quickly. The old routine caught men up again; by its very familiarity it brought a revival of spirits; by the end of May it was almost as if the battle had not been fought. The army was living wholly in the present.

  Yet with all of this there was a growing sense of great things to come. Chancellorsville had settled very little; it had been prelude, not finality, and army life was in a condition of unstable equilibrium. The desolate camping ground by the Rappahannock could not be a permanent abode. There was a rising tension, a dim foreknowledge of approaching climax. The big showdown that had seemed so near when the army moved for the Rappahannock fords at the end of April had not come off; it would come, and when it came it would be cataclysmic, bringing a day of violence worse than anything that had gone before.1

  The army’s failures had always been failures at the top. It was a great army, capable of great deeds, but no commander had ever used it with full throttle. McClellan, Pope, and Burnside had been either too cautious or too clumsy. Hooker, in a way, had been worst of all; crusty General Meade expressed the common feeling when he wrote to his wife that Hooker “disappointed all his friends by failing to show his fighting qualities at the pinch.”2 The army sensed that it would not fight another battle under Hooker, and the national administration had a firm conviction on the matter; the general remained in command, but he was operating on borrowed time, and although he was irritating his subordinates now by trying to find a scapegoat for disaster it seemed likely that when the next fight came someone else would be in charge.

  The next fight would come soon. Across the river there was a stir in Lee’s camps. Behind the cavalry screen the Confederate divisions began shifting toward the northwest, moving for the gaps in the Blue Ridge to reach the Shenandoah Valley, which offered a sheltered route to northern territory. Yankee cavalry crossed the river and provoked a savage fight at Brandy Station early in June, taking Jeb Stuart somewhat by surprise and getting a line on the Confederate movement. A bit later Hooker’s soldiers read a grim omen in the fact that all civilians and sutlers were ordered outside the army’s lines.

  Lee was moving in a wide arc, beginning a fateful invasion of the north. Hooker thought of pitching into him en route; considered, too, the idea of moving straight for Richmond, believing that this would speedily call Lee back. But Washington ordered Hooker to play a strict defensive game, and by the middle of June the Army of the Potomac was on the move, marching for the Potomac crossings above Washington, circling warily to keep itself between the invader and the national capital.

  As the two armies quickened their pace everybody watched — governments in Washington and Richmond, plain people North and South — as if the focus of the entire war centered here, with its final result and meaning depending altogether on what came of this desperate movement. Quick spurts of fire sparkled along the slanting fields, the copses and stone-fenced farms and drowsy hamlets on the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge, where hard-fighting cavalry patrols probed and sparred, fighting simultaneously for concealment and discovery. The Army of Northern Virginia became mysteriously elongated, advance guard splashing across the Potomac shallows above Harpers Ferry, rear guard lingering near Fredericksburg, other elements strung out between. Lincoln reflected that so long an animal must be very slim somewhere, and he suggested that it might be broken in half if the thinnest spot could just be found. But War Department distrust of Hooker was too solid by now, and Hooker could not take the initiative; he was crippled by the Chancellorsville failure, and neither he nor anyone else could prevent what was coming. All of the chances that had been missed in two years of war were piling up, generating a pent-up violence that must be discharged finally in one shattering explosion. What was coming was fated. The war was following its own grim logic, and the men who seemed to control it were being carried by a tide they could neither direct nor understand.

  Mid-June brought sweltering heat, with heavy dust in the torn roads, and the divisions of the Army of the Potomac were driven on in a series of forced marches which the men remembered as the worst they made in all the war. Men died of sunstroke or fell out by the roadside and staggered on to overtake their units after dusk, and the moving army trailed a soiled fringe of beaten stragglers; regiments would make camp at night with fewer than half of their men present, and the laggards would come stumbling in at all hours, exhausted.3

  (In the West, Grant clamped a tighter grip on Vicksburg and waited for the end, and Joe Johnston vainly sought guidance: seeing that it could not possibly hold both, did the Confederate government prefer to give up Tennessee or Mississippi? Rosecrans got his army ready for movement, and in Arkansas a Confederate column began a hopeless attempt to drive the Federals away from Helena and the rivers; yet those who watched the war kept looking to the North, to Pennsylvania, where Lee’s forward elements curled east toward York and Harrisburg, and as June came to an end they found themselves looking at a quiet little market town known as Gettysburg.)

  Gettysburg was a dot on the map marking a place where all the roads crossed; a pleasant little town lying amid rolling hills and broad shallow valleys, a blue mountain wall rising a score of miles to the west, rival armies moving toward it without design, as if something in the place drew them irresistibly. All of Lee’s army was north of the Potomac by now, connected with its southern bases by the thinnest of threads; it was on its own in a strange land, scooping up supplies from the fat Pennsylvania farming country, driven by an inexorable compulsion — lacking a supply line, it must eternally keep moving, because if it did not it would starve, and whenever and wherever it found its enemy it must strike without delay, no matter how the odds might look.

  Hooker’s army was above the river too, although Lee did not know it; Jeb Stuart, most famous of cavalrymen, had slipped the leash and gone off on a wild, meaningless raid that took him out of the play and left Lee groping in the dark, condemned at last to fight a battle in which he could not maneuver. But the Army of the Potomac was not Hooker’s army any longer. As June ended, the War Department at last extorted from Hooker the thing it desired but hardly dared ask for — Hooker’s resignation; and now Hooker was off in retirement and George Gordon Meade was in charge, his army loosely spread out across western Maryland, cavalry patrols groping north and west to see where the Confederate strength might be.

  Confederate strength was coming together fast, and it was all heading for Gettysburg. Lee had finally learned that the Army of the Potomac was north of the border, looking for him, and when the news reached him his own troops were strung out along sixty miles of Pennsylvania highway, from Chambersburg in the west to the neighborhood of York and Harrisburg i
n the east. It was necessary for him to concentrate east of the mountains and to do it at once, and couriers had been riding hard to call the scattered divisions together. The Gettysburg area was the handiest place for them to meet, and so to Gettysburg they were coming; and at daylight on July 1 a Union cavalry division that had bivouacked on a low ridge just west of town saw the head of a Confederate infantry column coming toward it.

  Stolid General John Buford, who commanded the cavalry, put his dismounted troopers in line, unlimbered his artillery, sent riders pelting south to notify Meade that the Rebels had been found, and opened fire. And from the moment when cavalry and infantry began to exchange long-range shots — firing tentatively, as if they were probing this embryonic battle to see what it might amount to — the two armies were committed to their most terrible fight.

  Gettysburg was an act of fate; a three-day explosion of storm and flame and terror, unplanned and uncontrollable, coming inevitably (as the war itself had come) out of the things that hard-pressed men had done in the light of imperfect knowledge, the end result of actions that moved with an inexorable logic toward a fundamental and astounding goal. It would come to symbolize all the war, as if the blunders and the heroism, the hopes and the delusions, the combativeness and the incomprehensible devotion of all Americans had been summed up once and for all in one monstrous act of violence. It was enormously destructive, its significance was not seen until long after it had ended, and — to make it finally and perfectly characteristic — it opened and closed with moments of heartbreaking drama.

  Buford’s cavalry had to hold the ridge until some of Meade’s infantry could come up. The Confederates got an infantry division in line and began to move forward, and ragged smoke clouds hung over the ridge as the firing grew heavier; then, in the middle of the morning, the leading brigade of General John Reynolds’s I Army Corps came swinging up the Emmitsburg road from the south, Reynolds himself galloping on ahead to see Buford and get a line on the fight. As the Federals came nearer they left the road and headed cross-lots, taking a short cut to the scene of action; and some impulse made the commander of this leading brigade shake out the battle flags and put the fife and drum corps at the head of the column to play the men into battle. On they came, five regiments of lean Middle Westerners, roar of battle just ahead, shrill fifes playing “The Campbells Are Coming,” eighteen hundred veteran soldiers tramping along in step.4 This battle of Gettysburg would begin with a flourish and a snatch of music, with the shock troops giving a last salute to the fraudulent romance of war before plunging into the storm. Then the music ended, the infantry ran out along the ridge, and the fight was on.

  This day began well for the Federals, but it ended disastrously. Reynolds’s men knocked the first Confederate attack back on its heels, capturing a Rebel brigadier and mangling a couple of Confederate brigades almost beyond repair; but Confederate reinforcements were reaching Gettysburg faster than the Federals, and the battle lines grew and grew until they formed a great semicircle west and north of the town, Federals outnumbered and outflanked, Reynolds killed and his army corps cut to pieces. Another Yankee corps, the XI, came up and went through town on the double, colliding head on with Confederates who were marching south from Carlisle. These Confederates cut around both flanks of the XI Corps’ line, crumpled them, punched holes in the line, and late in the afternoon drove the survivors back through the village in rout; then the line west of town caved in, and by evening the Federals who were left (they had had upward of ten thousand casualties) were reassembling on the high ground south and east of Gettysburg, grimly determined to hold on until the rest of the army came up, but not at all certain that they could do it.

  Perhaps Lee could have driven them off that evening and clinched things. Most of his army was on the scene by now, and the Federals were badly outnumbered; one final drive in the Stonewall Jackson manner might have done it. But Lee was fighting blind. The cavalry that might have told him where all of Meade’s men were was still absent, an exhausted column riding hard somewhere off to the east, and Jackson was in his grave, and by the time the southern generals had conferred and considered and weighed risks, night had come and it was too late. The battle would have to be resumed next day.

  July 2 came in hot after a windless night in which a full moon lit the dreadful debris on the fields and hills where men had fought on the first day. Meade was on the scene now, most of his army in hand and the rest coming up fast. He held good ground: Cemetery Hill, a massive height on the southern edge of town, wooded Culp’s Hill half a mile to the east, and the long crest of a ridge that ran south from the cemetery, taking its name from it — Cemetery Ridge — which ended in two rocky knolls a mile or more away, Little Round Top and Big Round Top. On these heights the Army of the Potomac waited while Lee prepared for a new assault.

  Running parallel to Cemetery Ridge, a mile west across a shallow open valley, was a similar rise in the ground, Seminary Ridge, taking its name from a Lutheran theological institute. On this ridge, looking east, was perhaps half of the Confederate army. The rest of the army was in position in and on both sides of Gettysburg, facing south — an awkward position, since it compelled the smaller of the two armies to occupy the longer line and gave Meade the advantage of a compact central position; wherever they made their fight, the Confederates would have to come uphill.

  One Confederate did not like the looks of it at all. James Longstreet was a stubborn, opinionated man, and on July 2 his opinion was that Gettysburg was not a fit place for the Confederates to fight — an opinion that he clung to with massive stubbornness. Better, he argued, to maneuver, sliding far around the Union flank and finding some position in which the Army of Northern Virginia could sit tight and let the Yankees do the attacking. But Lee looked east from Seminary Ridge, saw the ranks of the waiting Federals, and made the inescapable decision: The enemy is there, and there I will attack him. Longstreet argued, grumbled, and sulked, but it made no difference. Here the fight had started and here it would have to end.

  It was well on in the afternoon before the Confederates could make their attack; and this second day at Gettysburg was made up of many separate fights, each one a moment or an hour of concentrated fury, with a blinding, choking fog of blue powder smoke over the hillsides and the rocky woods, hammered down by unending deafening noise, sparkling and glowing evilly with constant spurts of fire. In the batteries the slim iron rifles and the squat brass smoothbores bounded backward at each discharge, their trail-pieces tearing the ground; sweating gunners manhandled them back into place, rammed home fresh charges, stood aside for a new salvo, and then ran in to lay hold of wheels and handspikes to make ready for another blast. Above all the racket there was the sound of men cheering and cursing and the fearful screaming of wounded horses, and all the ground was covered with dead and wounded. Ragged lines of infantry swayed in and out of the shifting veils of smoke, battle flags visible here and there, generals riding, gesturing with swords, couriers going in on the gallop with orders that might or might not be heeded. Commanding officers sent troops forward, called up reinforcements, peered anxiously through their glasses at the murk that hid the battle from their sight. They had called this violence into being but they could do no more with it. This was the soldiers’ fight now.

  East of Gettysburg there was Culp’s Hill, high and covered with trees, anchor of the right end of Meade’s bent line. Confederate Richard Ewell sent his men in, long battle lines forming in the flat ground and running forward into the woods. They found the Federals posted in solid breastworks of earth and felled trees; they struggled up the smoke-drenched hillside, stumbled back down, tried again, won a foothold that threatened the Union army with disaster — and could not quite make it, while the chain lightning of the flashing guns laced in and out among the tree trunks and sparkled in the hot woodland dusk.

  South of Gettysburg there was high ground along the Emmitsburg road, and here, against Meade’s orders, General Dan Sickles had posted the III Army Cor
ps. Longstreet drove his own army corps in on these men amid an immense bombardment, a cannon ball took off Sickles’s leg, and the III Corps was broken up and driven back in confusion, although it made a bitter fight of it before retreating. There was a peach orchard, where men fought hand to hand with bayonets and musket butts amid little trees shattered by shell fire. There was a wheat field, grain trampled flat and strewn with dead bodies, where Northerners and Southerners knelt thirty paces apart and blazed away with unremitting fury; the Federals lost the field, brought up reinforcements and regained it, then lost it for good when a new Confederate attack was driven home. Near the wheat field there was a great tangled area of boulders and stunted trees known as the Devil’s Den; it earned its name that afternoon, while men fired from behind rocks and trees, wounded men dragged themselves into rocky dens and crevices for shelter, and Yankee batteries in the rear blasted the place indiscriminately with shell and solid shot. East of Devil’s Den there was Little Round Top, swept by southern rifle fire, defended by last-minute Federal reinforcements who ran panting along the uneven hillside to drive back the Confederates who had swept through Devil’s Den.

  Sickles’s line was pulverized, and fresh troops who came in were broken and driven back, and for a time there was a great gaping hole all along the left of Meade’s line. But Little Round Top held, and a line of Federal guns was posted in a farmyard, where it held off Longstreet’s charging men until Meade could get fresh infantry on the scene. At one time a Confederate division charged all the way to the crest of Cemetery Ridge, and the Army of the Potomac was in danger of being broken in half; but the invaders could not stay, a series of disorganized but effective countercharges cut them and drove them back, and when darkness came at last the Union left continued to hold the high ground. Over near Culp’s Hill there was a final flare-up, and once again disaster came near; charging Southerners broke an infantry line and got in among the Yankee guns on Cemetery Hill, but a Union brigade ran in at the last moment, fighting in pitch-darkness with only the spitting fire from gun muzzles to tell where the battle line was, and the Southerners drew off at last and retired to the plain north of the hill. The second day at Gettysburg came to a close, and as the guns were stilled a constant, agonizing chorus of cries from the helpless wounded men filled the moonlit night; thousands upon thousands of maimed lay in field and woods and on the rocky knolls, all the way from Round Top and the wheat field around to Culp’s Hill.